I will add this: There are those of us who don't prepare our own food, for various reasons. I never have, and I never will. So what I do is buy frozen dinners (of which supermarkets have a huge variety these days) when they are on sale. The really good sales on frozen foods tend to be spaced about 3 to 4 months apart in our area. So when I see a great sale (such as half price on a particular brand I like), I fill up the small chest freezer.

The funny part is that everyone says that prepared (frozen) dinners are more expensive than making it yourself. I suppose that for some people, that might be true. However, I only eat twice a day (my morning meal is usually a bowl of oatmeal - hey, I like it, what can I say?) so at night I am eating a dinner or a large pot pie that costs me somewhere between $1.50 to $2.50, depending on how good the sale was when I bought it. But I have (usually) no food waste, no leftovers going bad in the refrigerator, don't have to buy freezer bags and such for storage, etc. and I really don't think I could come out further ahead if I could prepare my own food from scratch. I'm certainly not trying to convince anyone else that my way is the only "right" way, but just as there are people who love to cook, there are also people who loathe anything having to do with food preparation (and subsequent cleanup!), and frozen dinners fill an important need for those folks (like me!). And I'm sure they are healthier (and less expensive) than fast food, and often tastier.

BUT - you have to have a place to store them when they go on sale, otherwise you will be paying outrageous prices for them (or else eating the really cheap nasty stuff - not that everything inexpensive is nasty, but some of it sure is). A chest freezer is great because you can stack the boxes (rotating them so newest dinners are on the bottom) and they tend to keep the entire freezer cold, which means it uses less energy, and also your food will survive a power outage of maybe even a couple days if you throw heavy blankets over the lid when the power first goes out, or (if the outside temperature is near or below freezing) keep the freezer in a room that can be isolated from the rest of the house and exposed to the outside temps.

(One other trick, if you have a prolonged power outage in the dead of winter, is to just take your frozen food and put it in paper bags and then store it in your car trunk, making sure the car is parked in a shady spot or an unheated garage, or someplace where the interior of the car will not get heated. You can even take your food outside at night to cool it down, then at sunrise put it back in the freezer to (hopefully) stay cold for the day - BUT that only works if the freezer is FULL, either with food or ice, otherwise it may not get re-chilled enough at night to stay below freezing all day. Also, don't forget that there are animals that would love to get at your food, so don't just sit boxes of food outside!).